'Change is gonna come': Poverty from Johnson to Obama

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson visits a family in Inez, Kentucky, during a tour of poverty-stricken areas of the country in April 1964. Earlier that year, Johnson declared a "war on poverty" in his State of the Union address. He then worked with Congress to pass more than 200 pieces of legislation, which included early education programs and social safety nets such as Medicare and Medicaid.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – In 1971, a woman and child rest in their room at a New York City hotel for people living on welfare. Johnson's programs significantly reduced the poverty rate during his time in office, but it was still in the double digits (12.1%) when he left in 1969.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – Unemployed Americans stand in line at a New York welfare office in 1974. Economic crises gripped the country in the early '70s and, in many ways, dampened America's focus on the war on poverty.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – President Jimmy Carter, a man who rode into the White House as an anti-government Washington outsider, lessened the focus on the war on poverty. "Government cannot solve our problems," he said in his 1978 State of the Union address.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – A woman in 1987 participates in a workforce program that trains and finds new jobs for people on welfare.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – During a 1991 commencement speech given by President George H. W. Bush at Yale University, attendees hold signs that read, "George, don't turn your back on urban poor." Like Carter, Bush was more concerned with other issues during his presidency.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – A Medicaid recipient brings her daughter to a hospital in 1995. Medicaid, a federally run health program, was designed to provide coverage for low-income and disabled individuals.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – In 2005, displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina rest inside a shelter set up at the Superdome in New Orleans. Advocacy groups estimate homelessness in the city more than doubled in the aftermath of the storm. The disaster fueled dialogue on poverty and race relations in America.

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Photos:50 years of the 'war on poverty'

50 years of the 'war on poverty' – A mother unloads groceries purchased with food stamps in 2013. The federal food assistance program established by President Johnson in 1964 still helps many low-income Americans put food on the table today.

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Story highlights

Donna Brazile says while poverty has decreased, it has taken on a new form

Brazile: Lyndon Johnson knew what poverty looked like among poor whites and Latinos

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn't last for longBut now I think I'm able to carry onIt's been a long, a long time comingBut I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.—Sam Cooke

While many Americans continue to live on the "outskirts of hope," we still have reason to believe "a change is gonna come."

President Ronald Reagan's snarky comment in 1987 that "We waged war on poverty, and poverty won" was inaccurate and inhumane. Poverty is different, less widespread, and much less prevalent among older Americans now than before Social Security. I know that from my own experience, my family's experience, and the experience of the people I grew up with.

A recent study by Columbia University confirms that experience: Adjusted for inflation, poverty fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012 as a result of anti-poverty government policies and support. Yet, at the same time, the share of earned income available is shrinking in the private sector. The end result is fewer poor because of government's safety nets, but more and more people living on the brink of poverty because they don't have access to the wealth from our recovering economy.

Donna Brazile

Contrary to what some affluent, arrogant and ignorant pundits are saying, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty had nothing to do with the expansion of welfare as we used to know it -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The major War on Poverty programs were about education, empowerment and the elderly — Head Start, student aid and Medicare, to name a few.

Growing up around poor whites and Latinos in Texas, Johnson understood that poverty in America doesn't only have a black face. He launched the war on poverty in Appalachia, and later spoke movingly to Congress about the Mexican-American students whom he had taught as a very young man, saying: "My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes. ... And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child."

Fifty years later, in the photographs of Johnson talking with poor families in Appalachia, we see that he is really listening to them -- they are not strangers to each other. They aren't props for photo-ops. He has known these people all his life. And he never forgot where he came from.

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Marie Brookter, in her autobiography, "Here I Am -- Take My Hand," tells how Lyndon Johnson sought her counsel on his civil rights and poverty programs. When she called Johnson, or left a message at the White House front gate, he promptly called her back. He was open, humble, and genuinely seeking guidance in attacking poverty.

We have become bound by a political straitjacket that frames every debate: Too much federal government. Yet our forefathers forged this system for us. The federal government can accomplish what the states, acting alone or even in concert, cannot. Poverty is a national issue and needs a federal response. After all, U.S. federal government policies helped produce massive income inequality by lopsided breaks for the super wealthy.

Since the '70s, government policies have driven the economic benefits that produced the biggest income gap between the top 1% and the bottom 90% since the Great Depression. For the first time in U.S. history, the bottom 90% earn less than 50% of the nation's income. Even the rich, 52% of them, tell pollsters the economic system favors the wealthy.

The untold secret driving the obstruction to Obama's economic equality agenda is this: The opposition isn't really battling Big Government. The opposition is protecting an economic system that's putting more and more of the earned income out of reach for those aspiring to better themselves.

We don't have to frame every debate as right vs. wrong, left vs. right. Adjusting a wayward economy's tilt to the wealthy shouldn't be an either-or, despite some pundits' delight in false dilemmas. Even the weather gets treated as "I win-you lose."

The mentality that we can "come together" doesn't exist today.

But there's nothing wrong about working to further reduce poverty, or giving all Americans a fair shot at working their way up.

We, as a nation, have moral imperatives. We need to recognize that no one has all the answers. We need to agree that income inequality is a problem, that in the wealthiest nation on earth, people should not be both working and starving. We need government solutions. Members of Congress who obstruct our meeting the needs of the people need to return to their hometowns as private citizens.